Association of the year of snakes with one Chinese proverb of ‘enticing the snakes out of their caves’would be incongruous in that the snake is just only one of the twelve animals adopted in the Chinese zodiac that cycles every 12 years, and each year is named after an animal. The system itself has nothing to do with implication of degrading or humiliating with regard to the initiative of the scheme. Those twelve animals used by Chinese ancestors at least 2500 years ago during the period of spring and autumn era were representation of worship for animals for agricultural civilization, and the eleven of them were real creatures accompanying human beings with the dragon being the imaginary entity.
For an individual person, it makes no sense into which year you were born taking no superstition influence into consideration since no one has the capacity to decide when it’s time for your coming into being. For fortune-tellers, however, the Chinese zodiac can be taken as a means to achieve martial gains like what our dear TE correspondents have done here. For example, it’s stipulated that one born into the year of rooster will have no satisfying marriage with the other who was born into the year of monkey.
Superficially, the year of dragon signals good omens for Chinese as declare they are descendents of it but ironically, the year 1976, the year of dragon saw dramatic upheavals in mainland China. Another example goes that she would be widowed if she were to marry in the year of goat.
As time goes, such traditions have faded either in connotation or denotation, which is proof that people in mainland China are getting more and more logical minded towards their pursuit of happiness regardless of when to get married, give birth to a baby, and to whom they are to tie the knot.
Mao’s era has gone, and so the class struggle mentality under the proletarian dictatorship in China.